Public concern about urban housing for the poor actually dates back to well before the Civil War. In 1847, a group known as the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor published a survey showing that New York City tenement housing was “defective in size, arrangement, water supply, warmth, and ventilation, and that rents were disproportionately high.” As a result, the poor “suffer from sickness and premature mortality; their ability for self-maintenance is thereby destroyed; social habits and morals are debased, and a vast amount of wretchedness, pauperism, and crime is produced.”50
This belief in architectural determinism—the notion that the built environment shapes human behavior and a poorly built environment leads to debased morals, pauperism, and crime—guided the association’s solution, which was government regulation mandating minimum housing standards. Better housing, the association believed, would lead the poor to engage in less crime and more productive work, which would guide them out of poverty. Failing to persuade the New York City Council, the association went to the state legislature, which in 1867 passed a tenement house law requiring builders to provide a 10-foot backyard and a water supply and forbidding the renting of apartments that were totally underground. An 1879 law required a window in every room in a tenement.51
Ironically, the result of these laws were the dumbbell tenements that so horrified Jacob Riis: the narrow airshafts that created the dumbbell shape ensured that every room had a window even if the lower-story windows let in almost no light. This experience would be repeated over and over as low-income housing advocates, sometimes called “housers,” would propose government programs that, as finally implemented, did little for poor people other than make housing less affordable.
The New York State Tenement House Act of 1901, for example, required builders of new tenements to provide sanitary facilities, outward-facing windows in every room, and a courtyard for garbage removal in place of the airshafts where people tossed garbage. This act was considered a model law, but as historian Gwendolyn Wright observes, “The stipulations proved so strict that few speculative builders would divert their money into this kind of construction any more, and the housing shortage for the poor grew worse.”52
Wright points out that the housers “brought moralistic middle-class biases to their crusade” and “considered their own taste to be a universal standard of beauty, hygiene, and human sentiment.” When Chicago succeeded in condemning a tenement and was evicting its Italian residents, one reformer noted, “It was strange to find people so attached to homes that were lacking in all the attributes of comfort and decency.” One housing proposal urged that tenements be given more of those attributes by equipping them with such amenities as doorbells and bay windows.53 Such requirements, of course, would do nothing to fix the fundamental problem of urban poverty.
Rather than regulate urban housing, some housing reformers dreamed of moving working-class families to the suburbs, where land was cheap and they could live in uncrowded conditions. In the 1870s, Boston Unitarian minister Edward Everett Hale encouraged working-class men to form and join building and loan associations so they could buy suburban homes. Recognizing the transportation problem, Hale urged the railroads to provide “cheap trains for laboring men.”54
In New York City, Edward Bassett, a one-term member of Congress who later helped write New York City’s zoning code, argued that people should move “from crowded centres to the open spaces” where they could have “sunny homes and plenty of air.” Overcoming the transportation problem required “low fares, so that the expense might not deter people from moving where life would be pleasanter.” The main obstacle, he believed, was “the real estate forces of New York [who] believe in congestion” and who “prevent the opening up of new areas by five-cent rapid transit” for fear it will reduce property values in the urban core.55
Unfortunately, even the traditional nickel streetcar fares were beyond the reach of many unskilled workers. As planning historian Peter Hall notes, the development of the mass-produced automobile, not the five-cent streetcar, managed to “dissolve the worst evils of the slum city through the process of mass suburbanization.”56
Fortunately for working-class families outside New York City, most low-income housing in Chicago and other industrial cities would be considered luxury housing relative to the Lower East Side. Typical was the “two flat,” a two-story building with an apartment on each floor.57 Less common were three flats (or as they were known in Boston, three-deckers) for three families. Many flats were owned by absentee landlords, but often the owners of a two- or three flat would live on the top story (which was generally quieter and had slightly more square footage than lower stories) and rent out the other flats.
Like New York City tenements, two flats were built on 25-footwide lots, but most of the houses were only about 20 feet wide so there was room for a walking path between each one. They generally had small backyards, some of which have been filled with garages since they were first built in the late 19th century. Two flats and three flats on narrow lots, with occasional four- to eightplexes, provided enough density for working-class employees to live within walking distance of work in Chicago and other industrial cities. But the multifamily nature of the buildings meant that most workers could not achieve the immigrants’ dream of owning their own home.
Although middle-class families were less attached to the idea of homeownership than those from the working class, they enjoyed relatively high housing standards whether they rented or owned. A late 19th-century working-class home, such as the kind built by Samuel Gross in 1890, might have a parlor, a kitchen that doubled as a dining room, and two seven-by-eight-foot bedrooms, usually with a privy in back instead of indoor plumbing.58 Even more basic was a two-room working-class cottage, with a kitchen that also served as parlor, dining room, and bedroom for the children, and a bedroom that was sometimes shared with boarders.59
“A generation later,” says historian Joseph Bigott, housers such as Edith Abbott “denied that cottages ever provided decent accommodation.” Abbott argued “that the unskilled are a dangerous class; inadequately fed, clothed, and housed, they threaten the health of the community.” She wanted the government to build public housing for low-income families, but such government programs would be politically possible only if Abbott could persuade people that the homes workers provided for themselves were unsafe or otherwise inadequate.60 In attempting to do so, she was imposing her middle-class biases on working-class families.
Middle-class homes had several features not found in a typical working-class house of the 1890s: water, sewer, and (later) electrical hookups; a three-fixture bathroom; a kitchen sink and other new technologies, such as an icebox, washing machine, and, eventually, electrical appliances; a formal dining room; enough bedrooms so that parents and children could have their own rooms; a front porch; and storage closets (since working-class families had “little to store,” their basic homes “made almost no provision for built-in, enclosed storage”).61 Although working-class families aspired to add these features to their homes in the 20th century, the fact that their homes did not have them in the late 19th century did not mean they were ignorant or (except in the case of sanitation) dangerous to the community.
As the 19th century came to a close, Riis’s revelations about the abominable housing conditions of many low-income families led middle-class intellectuals to ask two important questions. First, how can the poor be assured of safe and decent housing? And second, how can we make sure they don’t move next door to us? Not surprisingly, the second question was answered first by government policies such as zoning and public housing, while the answer to the first